SYNCR is a synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models on cross‑video reasoning. It contains 4,000 question‑answer pairs across 4,827 unique videos, covering tasks in temporal alignment, spatial tracking, comparative reasoning, and holistic synthesis. The benchmark reveals a significant performance gap between current models and humans, with models excelling at temporal ordering but struggling with precise physical and spatial reasoning.
By Sara Ghazanfari, Siddharth Garg, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami
The paper introduces the Very Big Video Reasoning (VBVR) Dataset, a large-scale collection of over one million video clips organized into 200 curated reasoning tasks. It also presents VBVR-Bench, a benchmark framework that uses rule-based, human-aligned scorers for reproducible evaluation of video reasoning models. The authors conduct a large-scale scaling study, noting early signs of emergent generalization to unseen reasoning tasks, and make all resources publicly available.
By Maijunxian Wang, Ruisi Wang, Juyi Lin, Ran Ji, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Qingying Gao, Dezhi Luo, Yaoyao Qian, Lianyu Huang, Zelong Hong, Jiahui Ge, Qianli Ma, Hang He, Yifan Zhou, Lingzi Guo, Lantao Mei, Jiachen Li, Hanwen Xing, Tianqi Zhao, Fengyuan Yu, Weihang Xiao, Yizheng Jiao, Jianheng Hou, Danyang Zhang, Pengcheng Xu, Boyang Zhong, Zehong Zhao, Gaoyun Fang, John Kitaoka, Yile Xu, Hua Xu, Kenton Blacutt, Tin Nguyen, Siyuan Song, Haoran Sun, Shaoyue Wen, Linyang He, Runming Wang, Yanzhi Wang, Mengyue Yang, Ziqiao Ma, Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Freda Shi, Nuno Vasconcelos, Daniel Khashabi, Alan Yuille, Yilun Du, Ziming Liu, Bo Li, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu, Vikash Kumar, Yijiang Li, Lei Yang, Zhongang Cai, Hokin Deng
VBVR-Pro is a closed‑loop testbed that enables native visual reasoning through generation, offering 300 procedurally generated tasks that scale training and allow strong transfer to external benchmarks. It supplies verifiable reward scorers based on deterministic, task‑specific rules, outperforming VLM‑as‑a‑judge approaches and providing reliable signals for reinforcement learning. The suite also facilitates controlled modality studies, revealing that video generation excels at persistent spatiotemporal tracking while interleaved generation offers a compute‑efficient alternative, and highlights the importance of vision‑native trajectories for reasoning.
By Junxiang Xu, Ruisi Wang, Fanyi Pu, Maijunxian Wang, Ran Ji, Tongxi Zhou, Chenyang Gu, Jing Zuo, Hongcan Xiao, Yimeng Geng, Wanqi Yin, Wei Chen, Oscar Qian, Zhengan Yan, Ziqi Huang, Haiwen Diao, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Xiangyu Fan, Dezhi Luo, Fengyuan Yu, Zehong Zhao, Qingying Gao, Tinghui Zhu, Yilan Zhang, Jingqi Tong, Pinyuan Feng, Zhengze Jiang, Letian Wang, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Jieneng Chen, Sonia Joseph, Constantin Venhoff, Saman Motamed, Mengyue Yang, Chandra Sripada, Alan Yuille, Philip Torr, Lvmin Zhang, Vikash Kumar, Daniel Khashabi, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Vincent C. M\"uller, Anyi Rao, Quan Wang, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang, Hokin Deng, Zhongang Cai
STRAND is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models’ ability to track objects, their states, and relationships over time in videos. It evaluates intermediate reasoning by breaking queries into sub‑questions and uses Faithful Accuracy to ensure all parts of an answer are correct. The authors also propose an object‑centric framework that builds structured trajectories and shows reduced hallucinations and better temporal consistency compared to existing models.
By Thong Nguyen, Tri Cao, Khoi Le, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Quynh Vo, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Hooi Kuen-Yew
arXiv:2603.14733v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved strong performance in single-video understanding, yet their ability to reason across multiple videos...
By Yue Zhang, Liqiang Jing, Jia Li, Yapeng Tian, Xinya Du, Yunhui Guo, Vibhav Gogate
arXiv:2603. 10652v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In real-world deployment, vision-language models often encounter disturbances such as weather, occlusion, and camera motion.
By Yangfan He, Changgyu Boo, Jaehong Yoon
arXiv:2601. 07761v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) face a fundamental dilemma in video reasoning: they are caught between the prohibitive computational costs of verbose reasoning and the hallucination risks of efficient, ungrounded approaches.
By Yanxiang Huang, Guohua Gao, Zhaoyang Wei
The paper introduces REVEAL, a diagnostic benchmark that stresses Video‑Language Models (VidLMs) on five controlled probes—camera‑motion sensitivity, cross‑frame integration, video sycophancy, language‑only shortcuts, and temporal expectation bias—to assess how well these models encode and use visual evidence. Experiments on 12 VidLMs reveal systematic failures: some visual signals are never reliably encoded, while others are overridden by model priors, leading to performance below chance on several probes that humans solve with high accuracy. Mechanistic probes further pinpoint where and why visual evidence is lost, demonstrating that under assertive prompts a model’s output becomes nearly invariant to real versus random video input, rendering visual evidence causally inert.
By Sethuraman T V, Savya Khosla, Aditi Tiwari, Vidya Ganesh, Rakshana Jayaprakash, Aditya Jain, Vignesh Srinivasakumar, Onkar Kishor Susladkar, Srinidhi Sunkara, Aditya Shanmugham, Rakesh Vaideeswaran, Abbaas Alif Mohamed Nishar, Simon Jenni, Rohan Maheshwari, Derek Hoiem
arXiv:2608. 15869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use visual chain-of-thought (Visual CoT) to reason about spatial, temporal, and embodied environments.
By Xiaoyu Zhu, Xinke Deng, Suresh Taddewadikar, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Zhongyu Jiang, Ian Fasel, Joerg Liebelt
arXiv:2608.19583v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent studies suggest that video generation models can exhibit certain forms of zero-shot visual reasoning through generated frames. Yet rel...
By Xuan He, Cong Wei, Yuhao Cheng, Linrui Ma, Yuxuan Zhang, Zuojun Li, Yuhao Wen, Jize Jiang, Zeyi Liu, Yuren Hao, Songcheng Cai, Keming Wu, Penghui Du, Kai Zou, Rui Yang, Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang, Ping Nie, Kelsey R Allen, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, ChengXiang Zhai
TempCloze is a video cloze benchmark designed to evaluate visual temporal reasoning in Video-LLMs. The task presents a video’s beginning and ending clips and asks models to select the correct missing middle from four candidates, focusing on semantic, alignment, and progression aspects while minimizing appearance cues. Evaluation of 31 models shows that temporal alignment is the main challenge, with models performing better on semantic content and event progression but struggling to place events correctly in time.
By Wenqi Pei, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Yilai Liu, Jiahao Meng, Han Chen, Ziyu Wang, Hongyang Du
arXiv:2608.20814v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Though Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive potential in video understanding, long video understanding (LVU) remains challeng...
By Beibei Zhang, Chao Xu, Jun Lan, Zongyi Li, Lai Wei, Huijia Zhu, Tongwei Ren